Enterprises flock to SSD drives

In recent years, businesses of every size have increasingly explored the benefits of burgeoning technological advances. E-commerce has allowed many small operations to expand their business to reach a growing global market place. Meanwhile, organizations representing nearly all sectors have leveraged big data solutions to gain actionable insight from industry and consumer trends and to use that information to improve future operational decisions.

These advanced applications require greater performance capacities to provide businesses and their clients with optimal service. The bottlenecks inherent in traditional HDD technology can be extremely disruptive when attempting to launch a job-critical task, resulting in less effective enterprise operations, poor returns on big data investments and ultimately a dissatisfied client base.

Many businesses seem to be increasingly recognizing the need for greater data storage performance, as more companies have invested in SSD drives. Because solid state technology is based on NAND flash memory and has no internal moving parts, it is not susceptible to many common data reading bottlenecks, meaning operators can launch their applications and boot systems with far less lag time. According to a study released by Research and Markets, these performance enhancements have pushed many businesses around the world to pursue solid state solutions. This was particularly witnessed among companies that wished to launch their own big data projects. Researchers reported that the increased performance requirements of these initiatives represented new market growth potential for PCIe SSD technology.

Balancing cost, performance and endurance
Although the cost of solid state technology remains a barrier for widespread adoption, a recent study on enterprise SSD usage reported encouraging findings for the potential of future market expansion. Fifty-two percent of surveyed IT professionals said their organizations utilized solid state storage solutions. However, 55 percent cited cost as a major barrier to wider expansion. Meanwhile, 77 percent of respondents stated that the endurance of Flash-based memory would dictate the technology's growth potential.

"Since SSDs became a viable option for the enterprise performance, cost and reliability have been critical points of evaluation. However, as IT purchasers begin to better understand the technology's strengths and weaknesses, we are seeing more importance placed on the balance between endurance and cost," said data storage industry member John Scaramuzzo. "We have always believed that endurance is the key to making SSDs truly viable in the enterprise."

However, in an effort to lower costs, many respondents reported deploying consumer-grade multi-level cell flash drives. Because they are not designed for enterprise workloads, these drives have lower endurance levels, wearing out quicker than a more appropriate solution. As the cost of enterprise-level SSD drives drops, more businesses will have the opportunity to experience the benefits of a solid state storage solution that is tailored to their workloads and performance needs.